My life as an expat American artist living in Andalusia on the Costa del Sol, Spain, in Canillas de Albaida, a tiny mountain village and artists' colony, prods me to share vistas of life and art in south Spain as I search for the next Picasso or Goya, showcasing independent Spanish and international painters, illustrators and sculptors, galleries and exhibitions.

After living at the Hotel Queen Mary in Budapest (3.5 stars), I heartily recommend it: old on the outside, otherwise totally modern (23 rooms); it's an extremely excellent value. (I'm not getting a discount for this...it's my idea because it is what it is.)

The owner and staff are affable and speak English and German. Tel: 0036-1-413-3510; www.hotelqueenmary.hu; info@hotelqueenmary.hu.

There's a generous buffet breakfast that comes with the room, and everything in Budapest is close to you.

ArtTraveler´s video: an interview with Scottish illustrator and painter, Gordon Wilson, about his "I Love Fish" exhibition, inspired by a commissioned mural he did 13 years ago for a West Glasgow gangster, who loved supporting writers and artists as well as organized crime.

You may reach me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 915 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

I leave as a colorful palette, a collage of personalities who impacted me deeply--fusion art.

We become our experiences; we paint on our psyche.

As I return to Spain 26 July, having arrived in Hungary on 17 June, I leave these giving and generous, intelligent, talented and compassionate people behind.

But they are always with me.

This is the epiphany of travel and social intercourse, universal forces bonding us as humans.

And I am forever bonded with Hungary and those people who made it possible for me to write their stories, including others whose pictures I did not take but whose contributions loom large like Reka Deim, good friends Adam, Akos and Kinga, who introduced me to the Budapest underground.

And Raymond at the Barladino, whose intelligence and humanity I will always admire and remember.

It will take months to figure out what happened to me here.

While I searched for the Hungarian soul, I also sought my own to redefine my role as a human being for what time remains on this planet.

This quest continues unabated, although most of it I must accomplish through phone interviews and wonders of the Internet as funds are very limited.

But not my spirit or my will or my intensity.

Each of these people painted something on that blank canvas, left a footprint, an impression, created lasting images.

They gave freely of themselves.

All but three I knew cara a cara, face to face, some more intensely than others.

The three people whose images and lives remain a wonder and who for me are blank canvases on which I shall think and paint are the old man sitting in the milleu of what was billed as a violent anti-gay pride parade protest at Oktogon Square in Budapest on 18 June.

He self-published his memoirs as an Hungarian slave laborer in the Soviet Gulag, one of few who survived Stalin's horrific regime.

He shared his story, solemnly and quietly while madness raged around him.

Was he the real protest, a silent beacon against extremism?

The second is a white-bearded man with a broadly carved face time did not forget to mark with its humanity and no doubt pain.

He stood for a couple of hours through the dedication ceremony of a bronze statue of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, unveiled and hearalded at Heroes Square in Budapest in June.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, he quietly took out a small, older American flag and waved it once or twice, slowly, deliberately, then quietly put it away, out of sight.

But not out of mind.

His gesture appeared genuine, unrehearsed.

The third, a solitary woman who frequented the same bench in the Old Jewish Quarter of Budapest (7th District).

She appeared linked to the life of pigeons in this small park memorializing 63,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims, feeding these birds.

And then there are the two goats, Tunde (phon. Toon-day), nicknamed Uzike (Oo-zee-ke), pictured left in my photo, with her son, Csongor (pron. Chun-gor). (Both names are Hungarian poetic figures.)

I've become good friends with them, especially Uzike.

In February or earlier, I return to Szentendre (20 kilometers north of Budapest) for a month.

Documentary art photographers Katona Betti and Hajtmanszki Zoltan and two of their three children will live in my home in the mountains of Andalusia, I in theirs.

Ozike and I will become much closer as I will be milking her four or five times daily.

Each day in this troubled nation of brilliant intellectuals and artists, I experienced a new color, a different brush stroke and a lasting impression.

U.K. painter Andy Austin in Budapest, who organized on Facebook an exhibition of international artists to benefit cancer research at the Budapest Gallery 29 Kertesz Photograph by Stefan van Drake (2011)

After living at the Hotel Queen Mary in Budapest (3.5 stars), I heartily recommend it: old on the outside, otherwise totally modern (23 rooms); it's an extremely excellent value. (I'm not getting a discount for this...it's my idea because it is what it is.)

The owner and staff are affable and speak English and German. Tel: 0036-1-413-3510; www.hotelqueenmary.hu; info@hotelqueenmary.hu.

There's a generous buffet breakfast that comes with the room, and everything in Budapest is close to you.

ArtTraveler´s video: an interview with Scottish illustrator and painter, Gordon Wilson, about his "I Love Fish" exhibition, inspired by a commissioned mural he did 13 years ago for a West Glasgow gangster, who loved supporting writers and artists as well as organized crime.

You may reach me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 915 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

Here is Hajtmanszki Zoltan's artist's statement, his definition of a flaneur:

"Flaneur" is the French term for a roamer, a wanderer, a common Parisian figure at the turn of the last century, but flaneurs are everywhere in every giant modern city, for the flaneur is a professional walker who spends his days walking the streets of the capital.

The flaneur is a Bohemian, independent, generally an artist, but surely the most sensitive kind, one who looks at the whole of life as art.

These people have a feeling for their city, and they are standard elements of the cityscapes.

The flaneur observes the details of the landscape and makes notes of the city.

Flaneurs are symbols of personal freedom. They are not pieces of the big machine, but somehow they can exist and be creative in it.

The flaneur is a lucky chosen one, living by improbably simple rules.

But the flaneur doesn't ask why he wanders so easily while everything else is so hard.

The flaneur practices an uncertain profession and embraces it with an open heart.

A student of human life, the flaneur sees reality in atmosphere.

The flaneur is a researcher of human views.

The flaneur's self-assigned task is not to understand or explain reality, but to display it, to record as many views of it as possible.

These multiple views offer the flaneur a still but solid space for meditation, inspiring him to work.

What is this work for? Who knows?

I don't know. I've never known. I'm a flaneur. I take my walks.

By Hajtmanszki Zoltan appearing on the back cover of "Downtown Flaneur," Exposed Books, Budapest, Hungary 2003 with English consultant, Arthur Phillips; hardcover edition of 200 of the artist's black and white images.

Zoltan's works are in nine Hungarian public collections, including the Hungarian National Museum, Museum of Hungarian Theatre History, Budapest Historical Museum, Ministry of Interior, Refugee Department, Hungarian Museum of Photography.

He enjoys many private collectors. Five Budapest galleries represent him.

He has participated in 12 group shows since 1964 and 14 solo exhibitions since 1966, five of them in France, two of those in Paris.

He's an ArtTraveler extraordinaire, recording facts and human feelings in France, the United States, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Greece, Germany and extensively in Hungary.

He has published two additional books of his works, one of street life in Paris, the other about Balkan refugees in Hungary. He has also published two electronic/digital books of his works.

Zoltan recently signed a contract for a third print book with Sterling Publishing Co. of New York. His images shall complement prose by various writers on the subject of reading. No publishing date has been set.

Religious service of refugees in Nagyatad, Hungary Photograph by Hajtmanszki Zoltan (1992)

Rock on and practice peace and love.

Stefan, the ArtTraveler ™

ArtTraveler note:

After living at the Hotel Queen Mary in Budapest (3.5 stars), I heartily recommend it: old on the outside, otherwise totally modern (23 rooms); it's an extremely excellent value. (I'm not getting a discount for this...it's my idea because it is what it is.)

The owner and staff are affable and speak English and German. Tel: 0036-1-413-3510; www.hotelqueenmary.hu; info@hotelqueenmary.hu.

There's a generous buffet breakfast that comes with the room, and everything in Budapest is close to you.

ArtTraveler´s video: an interview with Scottish illustrator and painter, Gordon Wilson, about his "I Love Fish" exhibition, inspired by a commissioned mural he did 13 years ago for a West Glasgow gangster, who loved supporting writers and artists as well as organized crime.

You may reach me at stefanvandrake@gmail.com or by calling (34) 915 067 703 or from the UK at BT landline rates, 0844 774 8349.

About Me

Stefan van Drake aka Stephen Van Drake is an award-winning print journalist and photographer, published poet, lyricist and musician (blues & rock harmonica), a retired public interest trial lawyer and activist, who paints in oils and sculpts in alabaster. And who collects and showcases the works of Spanish, Latin American, European and other international emerging artists with special emphasis on independent artists living in south Spain. He has resided in 5 countries, traveling in 33 others and also curates a restaurant gallery.